Comments on S.G.Semenova's introductory article "Russian Cosmism" (changing the optics of comprehension)

Rozin Vadim Markovich Doctor of Philosophy Chief Scientific Associate, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences  109240, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12 str.1, kab. 310 rozinvm@gmail.com Other publications by this author

This article opens an interesting book with the same name "Russian Cosmism" ^[11]. Semenova interprets cosmism as a purely Russian phenomenon. It is significant, she writes, "that it is in Russia, which has become the birthplace of the scientific doctrine of the biosphere and its transition to the noosphere and opened a real path to space, since the middle of the last century, a unique cosmic direction of scientific and philosophical thought has been maturing, which was widely developed in the XX century. Among his number are such philosophers and scientists as N. F. Fedorov, A.V. Sukhovo-Kobylin, N. A. Umov, K. E. Tsiolkovsky, V. I. Vernadsky, A. L. Chizhevsky, V. N. Muravyev, A. K. Gorsky, N. A. Setnitsky, N. G. Kholodny, V. F. Kuprevich, A. K. Maneev. Russian Russian religious renaissance thinkers – V. S. Solovyov, P. A. Florensky, S. N. Bulgakov, N. A. Berdyaev – also have a line in their philosophical heritage that is close to the pathos of the ideas of Russian cosmism" ^{[11, p. 1]}.

However, the famous philosopher A.S. Ogurtsov does not agree with this understanding of cosmism. Russian Russian cosmism," he seems to be arguing with Semenova, "Unfortunately, the idea that Russian cosmism is a unique phenomenon of the Russian worldview has acquired the character of a prejudice. Moreover, it is seen as a radical futurology, which is “imbued with the desire for the highest perfection, according to the call of Christ.” Russian Russian cosmism is seen as an alternative to Western civilization... two assessments of “Russian cosmism” have firmly established themselves in the post-Soviet consciousness: firstly, that this trend is unique and represents a specifically Russian phenomenon and, secondly, its ideas are alternative to any ideologies abroad – from consumer to post-industrial society. I want to say right away that these estimates are not correct: there are also foreign versions of cosmic philosophy… So that cosmism is by no means only a Russian phenomenon" [6.

            Another difficulty I had when reading Semyonova's article is related to her interpretation of cosmism as a teaching: on the one hand, she tries to evaluate it reflexively, as a dream and ideals of cosmists, as if not identifying with their beliefs, for example, about the possibility of achieving immortality or the resurrection of the fathers, but on the other ? stating the views of cosmists, Semenova does not comment on them in any way and, moreover, it is clear that she fully accepts them. As a result, the conclusion with which Semenova ends is no longer surprising: "The current of Russian cosmism has a universal significance: it gives a deep theory, striking anticipations looking not only into modern times, but also into much more distant times" [11, p. 41]

            Finally, reading Semenova, I noticed the similarity of the arguments and discourse of her article, firstly, with the historical tradition coming from Chaadaev and Dostoevsky, in which her followers believed that it was Russia that would show the way to the West, and secondly, with the views of such modern ideologists of the renewal of Russia as A.Dugin or Yu. Gromyko. In a letter to Turgenev (1835) Chaadaev writes: "We are called to teach Europe a lot of things that it cannot understand without it. Don't laugh, you know – this is my deep conviction. The day will come when we will become the mental focus of Europe... this will be the logical result of our long loneliness... our universal mission has already begun" (quoted by ^[4]).  

In the "Diaries of the Writer" for 1880, Dostoevsky writes the following. "The main thing I have outlined is that our aspiration to Europe, even with all its hobbies and extremes, was not only legitimate and reasonable, in its basis, but also popular, coincided completely with the aspirations of the very spirit of the people, and in the end, undoubtedly has a higher goal... Our poor ordinary land, except the highest layer of its own, all entirely as one person. All eighty million of its population represent such a spiritual unity, which, of course, does not exist anywhere in Europe and cannot be, and, therefore, for this alone it cannot be said that our land is not ordinary, even in the strict sense it cannot be said that it is poor. On the contrary, in Europe, in this Europe, where so much wealth has been accumulated, the entire civil foundation of all European nations has been undermined and, perhaps, tomorrow it will collapse without a trace for ever and ever..." (quoted by ^{[3, pp. 419-420]}).

In the advertisement on You Tube of his new book "Russia ? Noah's Ark of Humanity: Philosophical, religious and methodological aspects of the state ideology of the future of Russia" (2019) Gromyko says: "The main idea of this book is to try to formulate the ideology of Russia's breakthrough into the future. Author Yuri Vasilyevich Krupnov and I are absolutely convinced that it is Russia, the Russian unique experience, the imperial experience, the socialist experience that is the basis for the people themselves to offer the Russian society, as well as the whole world, a unique ideology associated with breakthrough and development… Creative breakthrough technology based on the criteria of brotherhood, mutual understanding, non-capitalist way of movement is the basis for breaking into the future" ^[1].

            I see the similarity of these narratives with Semenova's discourse in three points: both offer a forecast of the future, affirm the world's leading, even saving role of Russia, formulate strange (today we would say "hybrid") arguments ? at the same time, from science and from faith. "The term "Russian cosmism," Ogurtsov notes, "unites completely heterogeneous currents from openly fideistic to atheistic, from the philosophy of All-Unity to projective ideology, from theocratic religious and philosophical currents to global evolutionism. In some currents of Russian cosmism, mystical insights are combined with futurological predictions built on completely rationalistic grounds, theosophy is combined with the depth of natural philosophical thought.… This motley typology reflects the fact that we are dealing with a very heterogeneous stream of thought, in which contradictory and often alternative currents merge (in a not very clear way). But what unites them? If something unites… We would like to emphasize right away that none of these trends has died in Russian culture" ^[6].

            What else caused me confusion. Semenova accurately sets out the basic postulates and beliefs of cosmists, but does not discuss at all how this is possible, if we keep in mind modern science. Probably, she herself shares these postulates and beliefs, which currently look not just like utopias, but unrestrained fantasies. For example, retelling the views of Sukhovo-Kobylin, Fedorov, Tsiolkovsky, she writes. "Now humanity, Sukhovo-Kobylin believed, is in its earthly (telluric) stage of development. He has to go through, win by his own effort two more: solar (solar), when there will be a settlement of earthlings in the near-solar space, and sideral (stellar), involving penetration into the depths of space and their development. This will be the Whole World, "universal humanity" – "the whole totality of the worlds inhabited by humanity in the entire infinity of the Universe"... "Technical man" will be replaced by "flying man": "the highest, i.e. solar, man will enlighten his body to the specific gravity of air... " for this he will develop his body into a tubular body, i.e. E. air, moreover, into the etheric, i.e. the lightest body." As a result of a transformative action aimed at one's own nature, a person will, as it were, throw off his current heavy one. the body shell and will turn into an immortal spiritual being. This is a radical rethinking of Hegel's "absolute spirit", which here turned into a real humanity in its future cosmic destiny" ^{[11, pp. 11-12]}.

            "Technization, Fedorov believes, can only be temporary and lateral, and not the main branch of development. It is necessary that a person should turn the same power of mind, invention, calculation, insight not to artificial prefixes to his organs, but to the organs themselves, their improvement, development and radical transformation (so, for example, that a person himself could fly, see far and deep, etc.). “Everything will be available to a person heavenly spaces, all heavenly worlds only when he will recreate himself from the most original substances, atoms, molecules, because then only he will be able to live in all environments, take all kinds of forms” <...>

In Russian cosmism, starting with Fedorov, the conviction is firmly established: humanity, complacently mired in lower freedom, freedom to rush in all directions, to explore all the arts, all the possibilities of its natural circle of existence, will never be able to gain the highest freedom of the good election of the ideal of the noosphere (or the Kingdom of Heaven), if it does not begin to transform itself its present physical nature, so that it gradually becomes capable of realizing this highest ideal, noospheric (or actively Christian). Lasting moral improvement of a person is possible only after and together with his physical transformation, liberation from those natural qualities that make him devour, displace, kill and die himself <...>

            Konstantin Eduardovich imagined the universe as a single material body, through which atoms that have left the disintegrated mortal bodies, atoms that are indestructible "primitive citizens", primitive "I", endlessly travel. The real blissful life for them begins in the brain of the higher, immortal beings of the cosmos, despite the fact that the vast gaps of “non-existence”, being in the lowest material form, as if they do not exist at all. The guarantee of achieving immortal bliss for brain atoms is the destruction on the scale of the Earth and space of imperfect forms of life subject to suffering, where these atoms could get" ^{[11, p.8, 18, 35]}.

            Well, why shouldn't Semenova explain how human life is possible without technology, how a person can become a solar being and fly, why she identifies the noosphere (a purely rational concept) and the Kingdom of Heaven, why it is necessary to resurrect only fathers (what did mothers and children who died before Fedorov?) and many other strange, from the point of view of modern rational and scientific thinking, provisions? The only explanation is that this is how evolution will go. "This is the idea," writes Semenova, "of active evolution, i.e. the need for a new conscious stage in the development of the world, when humanity directs it in the direction dictated by reason and moral sense, takes, so to speak, the helm of evolution into its own hands. Therefore, it may be more accurate to define this direction not so much as cosmic, but as actively evolutionary. For active evolutionary thinkers, man is still an intermediate being, in the process of growth, far from perfect, but at the same time consciously creative, designed to transform not only the outside world, but also his own nature. It is essentially about the expansion of the rights of conscious spiritual forces, about the management of the spirit of matter, about the spiritualization of the world and man. Space expansion is one of the parts of this grandiose program. Cosmists have managed to combine concern for a large whole – the Earth, the biosphere, the cosmos with the deepest demands of the highest value – a particular person. It is not for nothing that such an important place here is occupied by the problems associated with overcoming illness and death and achieving immortality. Humanism is one of the most striking features of this remarkable galaxy of thinkers and scientists, but this humanism is not caring and dreamy – it is based on deep knowledge, it follows from the goals and objectives of the most natural, cosmic evolution" ^{[11, p.2]}.

            What is this "grandiose program" (let's agree, utopian) or "deep knowledge" ("deep theory, amazing anticipations", i.e., the forecast of development)? And why does Semenova think that evolution is going in the direction indicated by the Russian cosmists? Modern evolutionary theories say something completely different: nothing resembles the path they predicted: technology is developing at an ever faster pace, the noosphere is not developing, reason is not winning, egoism is growing, immortality is not being achieved, humanity is rapidly approaching the fatal line. I listened to a couple of speeches by Semenova and the second compiler of the book Anastasia Gacheva: very interesting and reasonable speakers, and at the same time "naive to the point of impossible", or not naive, but fully sharing the faith of cosmists both in their understanding of evolution and in the possibility of physical transformation, the resurrection of fathers, immortality and other amazing things?

   I can compare my perplexities only with the criticism, or rather, the almost rude denial by I. Kant of the esoteric teachings of his contemporary Emanuel Swedenborg. The latter also claimed the immortality of man (according to his teachings, every person is a spirit and when his earthly cycle of existence ends, he either ascends to heaven as an angel or descends to hell as a demon), if you believe Swedenborg's words, met with Christ and communicated with angels many times, insisted that the Lord consists of angelic communities nevertheless, He has the appearance of a person who maintains a balance between heaven and hell, and angels serve the Lord and continue to love in heaven the one they loved as people on earth. In the article "The Dreams of the Visionary, explained by the dreams of metaphysics," Kant writes:

"Therefore, I will not condemn the reader in the least if, instead of considering the visionaries as half belonging to another world, he immediately writes them down as candidates for treatment in a hospital and thus saves himself from any further research... in Swedenborg's work, I find the same bizarre game of imagination that many other amateurs found in the game of nature, when they drew the holy family in the outlines of spotted marble or in stalactite formations – monks, fonts and church organs…I am tired of quoting the wild ravings of the worst of all science fiction writers or continuing them until they describe the state after death... it would be in vain to try to hide the fruitlessness of all this work – it catches everyone's eye" ^{[5, pp. 327, 340, 347]}.

   Kant denies Swedenborg's teaching on the basis of the belief that there is no such reality as Swedenborg talks about objectively. But it clearly existed for Swedenborg himself, just as the reality of cosmists objectively exists for Semenova and Gacheva. In the book "The Demarcation of Science and Religion: An Analysis of the Teachings and Creativity of Emanuel Swedenborg," I reconstructed how the latter came to believe in reality, strongly denied by Kant. The fact is that Swedenborg, on the one hand, believed in God from childhood and never doubted the existence of a divine ("spiritual") reality, on the other ? being the largest scientist and engineer of the first half of the XVIII century, he did not doubt the existence of nature with its laws. On many of his quite secular scientific, engineering and philosophical manuscripts at the bottom of many pages there is the following instruction to yourself:

"1. Often read the Word of God and reflect on it.

2. To submit oneself in everything to the will of God's providence.

3. Observe true decency in all actions and always keep an impeccable conscience.

4. To fulfill honestly and truthfully the duties of one's rank and duty of service, and to try to make oneself a useful member of society in all respects" ^{[12, p. 4]}.

   And here is the evidence of Swedenborg's belief in two immediate realities at the same time (Spirit and nature); the whole order of nature is conditioned by the order of Spirit, but the latter itself is an order that coincides with nature. "Let us say in advance," writes Swedenborg, "what correspondence is: the whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual not only in generality, but even in every particular; therefore, everything that exists in the natural exists as a result of the spiritual world is called correspondence... nature was created only to clothe the spiritual and, accordingly, depict it in the latter degrees of order <...> The Lord never does anything contrary to order, because he himself is order. The divine truth emanating from the Lord forms an order, and the divine truths are the laws of this order, according to which the Lord leads man" ^{[12, pp. 48, 53, 284]}.

So Swedenborg lived simultaneously in two immediate realities ? Spirit and nature. As a scientist, a naturalist, looking at the first reality from the second, he could not help but see the Spirit of contradictions in reality. Judging by his works, the central contradictions, completely intolerable for Swedenborg as a scientist and a Christian, were the following: God as a trinity, from the point of view of Aristotelian logic ? a vivid contradiction, the death of a person and the resurrection from nothing at the Last Judgment ? contradicted the laws of physics, the impossibility of salvation for someone who lived righteously, but for some reason was not baptized - did not fit into Swedenborg's head.

And so Swedenborg, accustomed to building consistent scientific theories and solving engineering problems, does the same in this case: he proves that God is not a trinity, but one, that man as a spirit is immortal, that anyone can be saved if he lived righteously. In other words, Swedenborg brings the reality of the spirit into line with the reality of nature, by the way, and vice versa, proving that the processes of nature are conditioned not only by the laws of nature, but also spiritually. Swedenborg reinforces this new understanding of both realities with the "principle of correspondence". From the point of view of faith, the task was solved and there was no need to justify a new picture of the world (immediate reality), but, from the point of view of science, such a justification was suggested (for example, to answer the criticism of opponents like Kant). How was it possible to convince rationally thinking opponents (and there were many of them) in a new reality, moreover, diverging significantly from the canonical Christian faith?

Here it is necessary to take into account that Swedenborg understood the justification of the consistent reality built by him "as the knowledge of spiritual reality in the spirit of the latest natural science for his time. The latter required facts and experiment, which, however, did not exist. The situation for Swedenborg was quite dramatic. The new spiritual reality had practically already taken the place of the canonical one, it was perceived as the true state of affairs, but it was in contradiction with both the religious dogmas of the church and Swedenborg's own scientific methodological guidelines, according to which this reality needed to be confirmed by experience. 

In this situation, Swedenborg's psyche comes to the rescue, which began to produce spontaneous dream–like plots, on the one hand, filling in the missing elements of scientific thinking and reality, on the other hand, “painting” such a picture in which Swedenborg received a sanction from above for a new way of cognition and thinking. In this case, we are talking about Swedenborg's meeting with Christ and communion with angels. “Now," writes Swedenborg, "let us turn to experience. That angels have a human image, that is, that they are the same people, I have seen this up to a thousand times: I have talked to them as a person to a person, sometimes with one, sometimes with many together, and I have never seen their external image differ in any way from the human one; sometimes I marveled at this but so that this would not be attributed to deception of the senses or imagination, I was given to see them in reality, with full consciousness of the senses and in a state of clear comprehension” ^{[7, p. 42]}. 

In my works on psychology and esoteric teachings, I analyze a special group of psychic phenomena that represent "dream-like states", starting from the direct breakdown of dreams during wakefulness (hallucinations), ending with various cases of combining dreams and wakefulness. The latter include the so-called "waking dream" and esoteric "dreams". In a waking dream, our dreams, which we did not have time to realize during the sleep period, adapt to the images and themes of the waking consciousness. Indeed, how often, without getting enough sleep, we can not concentrate on the events of our current life; our thoughts float away somewhere to the side, interrupted by some memories, fantasies, images. In fact, these uncontrolled and seemingly coming from the outside plots are our dreams, smuggled under the guise of waking themes, intertwined with waking perceptions. 

Esoteric "dreams" are not formed by themselves and not immediately. They are preceded by several processes: the formation of an esoteric personality, the suppression of realities that do not correspond to the esoteric worldview, the strengthening of the pressure of blocked desires, the implementation of which should ensure that the esoteric personality reaches the true reality, the development of mechanisms of dream-like states. When all these prerequisites can be formed, the conditions for esoteric "dreams" are formed: in fact, this is the realization in the waking period of dreams that ensure the realization of events related to true reality. In this respect, what the esoteric sees and experiences here is created by the work of his psyche, pre–formed by esoteric life and personality (see for more details (cv), on the other hand, "essentially converging with the canonical Christian faith, for example, Kant's criticism). ten sob ^[8]).

Is it possible to assume that Swedenborg's spiritual world also represents esoteric dreams on the themes of Holy Scripture?

As I show in my research, entering the consciousness of dream-like realities involves understanding and working thinking, creating interpretations, formulating new approaches, and even rethinking one's position in the world. All this we find in the life of Swedenborg. Firstly, he outlines new principles of scientific cognition: interprets nature as subordinate to the spiritual world, formulates the correspondence relation and the procedure for identifying correspondences associated with it, considers the statements of angels and his own spiritual experience as facts and scientific experience. Secondly, he claims that the church does not adequately expound the Holy Scriptures, and the Lord revealed the secrets to Swedenborg and washed away the true Words. Thirdly, as we remember, Swedenborg declares himself the messenger of the Lord, the Messiah, called to reveal to Christians the true meaning of the Word and knowledge of reality, as the last times are coming. "Such a direct revelation is being made today because it is the same one that is understood by the coming of the Lord" ^[7]. These three innovations can be considered a Swedenborgian turn, which opened the way for many esotericists coming later from science or philosophy.

Here, of course, one can object by saying that the rationale proposed by Swedenborg is not much different from the fantasies of a sick imagination attributed to Swedenborg in Kant's article. But this way we can get to the point that any philosophical constructions are the fruit of a sick imagination. No, the reality built by Swedenborg has the same right to exist as, for example, the ideas of Plato, the God of St. Augustine, the mind of Kant or the absolute spirit of Hegel. All these realities are the result, on the one hand, of the realization of the personality of these philosophers, on the other hand, of understanding the problems and challenges of the time to which they responded, on the third hand, following a certain tradition of thinking. But let's return to the cosmists and Semenova, projecting the logic of the reconstruction of the construction (discovery) Swedenborg's direct reality on their personality and creativity.    

   It is not necessary, like Kant did, to consider the cosmists and Semenova not quite mentally healthy and ignorant in scientific terms. They were completely normal and fairly educated people (for example, Svetlana Semenova is a Russian philosopher, literary critic, historian of Russian thought and literature, Doctor of Philology, member of The Union of Writers of Russia, researcher and publisher of the heritage of N. F. Fedorov, specialist in Russian cosmism). The matter is different. They were bright personalities who dreamed of Russia taking its rightful place in world history and culture, who believed in the power of science and at the same time in Orthodoxy, who thought rationally and sacrally at the same time, confident that evolution would go in a direction that would allow solving the main problems and contradictions faced by humanity, who believed that their efforts and creativity will bring the desired development of events closer. So, for example, the composer Scriabin thought, ideologically close to the cosmists.

"The mystery of Scriabin," writes B. F. Schletzer, "was supposed to be the fulfillment, the realization of ecstasy, death and transformation of the universe." The realization, not the reproduction, and the universal, superpersonal character of this action are the two moments that determined the development of the Mystery. In miniature, the plan of the Scriabin Mystery is the history of mankind as a process of separation and immersion of spirit into matter, the acceptance of nature into Spirit, victory over the heaviness, inertia, fragmentation of the natural world and a return to unity." "In Scriabin's notes, the goal and result of historical and cosmic evolution is ecstasy, the experience of which leads to a complete transformation of the cosmos and humanity in it. He states: “Ecstasy is the peak, there is the last moment, which ... means the whole history of mankind. Absolute being is realized... at the moment of the completion of the Divine creation, at the moment of ecstasy." "L. L. Sabaneev writes, reproducing the picture that Scriabin repeatedly painted to his friends: "He imagined the very secret action of the Mystery, the very processality of its course, as a sequence of experience by all participants in themselves of the whole history of the process of the fall of the Spirit into matter.".. The word and forms, music and all the incoming artistic entities were supposed to symbolize the successive vicissitudes of the consciousness of the Spirit" (quoted in ^{[8, p. 323]}).

            Like Swedenborg, cosmists and Semenova built a reality in which all the moments listed here (dreams, intentions and actions) received a place and meaning. If you do not understand how such a reality arose and was created, but look for an explanation of these constructions within the framework of ordinary logic, then it turns out that there is no logic and meaningful discourse in the narratives of cosmists and Semenova. But it is there, only for understanding a turn is needed ? to the problems and aspirations of the individual, to the built reality in which these problems are resolved (albeit in virtual terms for now), to the historical tradition of thinking. The analysis shows that cosmists, Semenova and some modern ideologists like Dugin or Gromyko continue to move in line with the Russian tradition, outlined by Chaadaev, Dostoevsky, Russian religious philosophers, Konstantin Leontiev, Solzhenitsyn ^[9]. Another tradition characteristic of the creativity of all the thinkers listed here is esoteric, which allows you to create realities, omitting the problems of realization, following only one thing ? the construction of the world for your own personality. Russian Russian culture has always been hateful to the Russian soul, so Russians joined the most left-wing, revolutionary camp, i.e. they became fighters against Europe.^[10] "In the June section of the "Diaries of the Writer" Dostoevsky writes: "The Russian soul has always hated European culture, so Russians joined the most left-wing, revolutionary camp, i.e. they became fighters against Europe…Russia is not Europe...it has long been in Russia in the bud and in the possibility, but not in a revolutionary form, but in the form in which these ideas of universal human renewal should appear: in the form of divine truth, in the form of Christ's truth, which someday may be realized on earth and which is fully preserved in Orthodoxy” <...> “The bourgeoisie will end and a Renewed humanity will come. It will divide the land into communities and begin to live in the Garden"" (cit. according to ^[9]). What is this if not a utopian and esoteric worldview?